In the first days of October 2022, Loretta Lynn told her family that the angels were coming for her. She was 90 years old, her health had been declining, and the people who loved her most heard the words and let them pass. A year later, they admitted they had dismissed her. She had been telling them the truth.
A Quiet Last Weekend
Nothing about that weekend looked like a farewell to the outside world. On September 25, Loretta had marked 60 years as a member of the Grand Ole Opry. She did not return to the stage for the occasion. A stroke in May 2017 had ended her life on the road, and her last major public performance had come in April 2019, when she joined the finale of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” at an all-star tribute for her 87th birthday in Nashville.
On Sunday morning, October 2, her Facebook page shared a Bible verse from the Gospel of John about living by the truth and coming into the light. Bible verses were nothing unusual on her page. Only afterward did fans realize it would be the last message she ever posted.
Doo Was Coming to Take Her Home
On Monday, October 3, Loretta was talking and animated. According to a long Facebook post her daughter Peggy Lynn Marchetti wrote soon after, Loretta told the family she was ready to go to heaven and that Doo was coming to take her home. She said she had been told she was really going home.
Peggy wrote that it felt surreal, because only a day earlier her mother had been so lively. She summed up those last hours in a single line:
She knew and was happy.
Who Doo Was
Doo was Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn, also known as Mooney. Loretta married him as a teenager in Kentucky. She long said she was 13, but state records later found by the Associated Press showed she was 15. He was the one who pushed her to sing in public and helped her chase her first record when nobody in Nashville knew her name.
Their marriage was never easy, and Loretta never pretended otherwise. But they stayed together for 48 years and raised six children. In 1966 they bought the entire settlement of Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, about 65 miles west of Nashville, and turned it into the ranch that became their home. Doo died in 1996, just days before his 70th birthday. For 26 years, Loretta lived on without him. In her final hours, he was the one she said was coming for her.
Still Singing in the Middle of the Night
Peggy’s post also described what those last years had been like. After the stroke, her mother deeply missed her fans, her friends, her tour bus, her stage dresses and, most of all, the connection she felt with an audience.
She never stopped singing. At home, Loretta would sometimes break into song at full volume in the middle of the night, startling her caregivers. Peggy joked that her mother simply needed to remind them she still had the voice.
The Morning of October 4
In the early hours of Tuesday, October 4, 2022, Loretta Lynn passed away peacefully in her sleep at her ranch in Hurricane Mills. Her family called one another and rushed to the house. Within hours, they released a short statement confirming that their mother was gone, and tributes began pouring in from Dolly Parton, George Strait, Reba McEntire and much of the country music world.
On October 7, she was laid to rest on the ranch she had loved for more than half a century. A Humphreys County sheriff led the motorcade. On October 30, friends and fellow stars gathered at the Grand Ole Opry House for a televised celebration of her life, which opened with a message Loretta had recorded for her fans before she died, thanking them for the life they had given her and her children.
A Year Later, Counting the Days
On October 4, 2023, the family posted a remembrance on her website. It opened by going back to the morning she died:
It was just supposed to be another day.
They wrote that it was meant to be a day of errands and figuring out supper and, as always, talking to Momma. Instead, she was really gone. To the world she was the legend, the record breaker and the pioneer. To them, she had always been Momma.
Then they measured the year the way families do. Twelve months since they had heard her voice. The first birthdays she had not been there to sing to them. Fifty-two weeks since their last conversation, and the first decisions made without her. Three hundred sixty-five days since they had seen her smile.
They also admitted the part that still hurt. At 90, they had known the moment would come. But when she warned them the angels were on the way, they had brushed it aside.
The remembrance ended with a promise. The family wrote that they were committed to honoring her life, her songwriting and her music, and that they would carry that work for the rest of their lives.
Months earlier, on what would have been her 91st birthday, they had shared another memory. One year before, they had gathered in her living room for her 90th. They ate, they laughed and they sang, because Loretta always sang. Six months later, she was gone.